Advantages and Disadvantages of online Shopping

Nowadays, online shopping is becoming a trend in most of the countries around the world, specially among the young generations. Every year a lot of customers acquire their products or services through online websites after evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of this type of shopping. If we go through the statistics, we can see that 845 million of customers used the online shopping in the last year (a number that have grown a 40% in just 2 years). The countires where the online shopping is more succesful are South Korea, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and United States. Despite, this fact, online shopping. Despite this fact, online shopping has several limitations, and these are the main ones for e-tailers of clothing and fragance products:

- Customers can't try, touch, smell or check the product: Online shopping sites provide only visual stimuli to their customers, that means that they can touch, try or see in person any of the products, and this may make the customers doubt about the quality of the products, the characteristics, the functions, etc. This disadvantage is specially important for the clothes and parfums websites, since the customers can't know if the clothes will suit them or not or if the parfums will smell good.

- Customers have to wait to get their products: In traditional shopping you pay for the product and you can use it inmediatly  but, in online shopping, you have to wait till the product is delivered to your home. Also, depending on external factors, the delivery may be delayed because of weather problems, holidays, problems with the payment, etc. Because of that, some customers may be turned away if they need the product fast, if they don't want to wait to get it or if they don't want to pay an extra amount of money for an express delivery (since in quite a lot of shopping websites the express delivery is not free).

- Lack of trust: Some customers may feel a lack of trust when they are doing online shopping, since they will provide  a lot of personal and private information such as their names, adress, credit card numbers, bank accounts, etc.

- No sales assistance: When you go to shop, you can get assistance and counceling from the experienced employees that work there and ask them whatever you need, and they will always help you. This doesn't happens in online shopping. You are alone in front of dozens of products and you can't get any help or advice, about wich product is better according to your needs, wich clothes will suit you more, etc.

But, how can marketers overcome these disadvantages?

- To solve the first disadvantage, the websites should include high quality and realistic pictures of the clothes, so you can check every detail. They have to include too some information about the product like a description, the materials used, the style, information about the sizes etc. Also, the websites must provide a free-return policy, so the customers can buy any clothes, try them when they are delivered, and if they feel dissapointed they can change it for another one or get their money back without any additional cost. Finally, for the parfum shopping websites, it would be good if they cand provide some free testers to the customers, so they can smell the parfum before spend a high quantity of money.